


Lavender Blue

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Anti-Soul Bond, Gen, Kismet defied, M/M, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 08:19:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2614862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am apparently a rarity in finding the entire "soul bond" and "written on your wrist" thing a bit creepy and a lot scary, rather than romantic. Bad enough when your parents arrange your marriage. Counting on nature to get it right? You're kidding me, yeah?</p><p>So. This can best be described as a reverse soul bond story. It does have a happy ending, but it takes awhile. If you have to classify it as anything, classify it as Mystrade. Eventually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lavender Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Lavender blue, dilly-dilly, lavender green  
> When you are king, dilly-dilly, I'll be your queen.  
> Who told you so, dilly-dilly, who told you so?  
> It was my heart, dilly-dilly, that told me so.

The signs came out on his inner arms when Mycroft was twelve. He knew what it was—though many twelve-year-old boys would not have. Mycroft was too knowing for his years. Mummy told him so—“Too much knowledge, too little experience, Mikey. It’s not always a good mix.” Still he knew what the deep purple dapples on his arms meant, and what would happen in the weeks, months, years to come.

He rolled back the sleeves of his pull-over shirt and frowned. He could see the whorled fingerprint marks clearly—far more clearly than seemed reasonable on those deeply bruised marks. He knew the progression—the marks would start as fingerprints, then stretch and narrow, forming looping helices that those who understood could read as DNA. Then, year by year, the spirals would reform yet again, into whatever writing was best understood by the victim, forming a name.

His mouth tightened, and he shivered. He went to the school lav and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, knowing it wouldn’t work, but needing to try anyway. Maybe the fight he’d had the day before to defend Sherlock had left marks. Maybe he’d smacked into something without realizing. Maybe he’d got ink or paint on himself.

He scrubbed and scrubbed, tugging out coarse brown paper toweling and soaping it up, then scraping it over his arms. When one of the older boys from the form above his came in and asked what he was doing in a frightened voice, he didn’t answer. When the teacher came rushing in later, brought by the older boy, he looked up at her, tears in his eyes, and held out his arms. “See—it’s working—it’s lighter, now. Red, not purple…”

The school’s headmaster called his parents to bring him home, and promised to arrange counseling for him and for the family. Father couldn’t speak. Mummy’s lips went tight and white, and she said, “Thank you. I do appreciate it. But we can see to that on our own. We’ve got connections.”

Which they did. The Holmeses were a respected family in the county, and Mummy and Father were respected in their own circles, professional and social alike.

“The first thing,” the counselor said, only days later, “is not to think of it as ‘doom’ or ‘fate.’ It’s an opportunity, that’s all. A different way for things to work out. Now, I’ve been checking. No one whose prints match has reported in to the National Registry, but people don’t, I’m afraid. Plenty try to hide it—or their parents do. It may be someone from another nation. The child may not even have been born yet. But doctors in the National Health services keep an eye, and PE teachers and the like are all instructed to report if they see signs. With luck you’ll know who he’s bonded to soon enough. Probably a perfectly nice girl from a perfectly good family, not so different from yours.” She leaned close to Mycroft, and said, in what she no doubt thought to be a comforting tone, “Just think—you’re lucky! Most little boys have to worry that they’ll never find a good match. You know you already have, and everything before that can just be practice, for fun.”

Mycroft looked at her with fierce anger. “What if I don’t want a good match? Or a perfectly nice girl? And what are all the practice girls supposed to think, knowing they’re just for fun? Not so nice for them, after all.”

“See, now, that’s entirely too pessimistic,” the counselor said, reprovingly. “Just think of how much control you have, knowing in advance!

Mycroft knew in that moment he would never trust the counselor. She didn’t just look for a silver lining—she lied. Soul mating wasn’t control gained, but control lost. As for the fictional “nice girl from a nice family,” the odds were against it. Soul mates tended to occur within cultures, in a broad sense. Mycroft was more likely to be bonded to someone who spoke English than otherwise, who grew up on English soil. He was more likely to be bonded to a girl than a boy, and to someone healthy and sane than not. But everyone knew of soul matches that flew in the face of the odds. King Edward and that terrible American divorcee, Mrs. Wallace, for example. Or Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe—and Shakespeare a happily married man, convinced his soul match had died in the plague epidemic of 1578, when he’d still been a boy.

The truth was, that was what soul-bound usually hoped for, guts filled with guilt but hoping regardless. They hoped their unknown other would die before they ever met—in a train wreck, in a car crash, drowned on a seaside holiday, sick with some pitiful disease. Dead, dead, dead, and unable to ever appear out of nowhere to set off catastrophic emotional earthquakes and wrench otherwise orderly lives out of shape. So few soul-matches were happy. Passionate, yes—often. Obsessive? Almost always. Very few had the strength of will or endurance to turn away from the soul bond if they ever met their mated.

The National Registry was the latest attempt to tame the beast of soul mating. The hope was that if a child’s soul mate could be found young enough they could be brought up knowing each other. Understanding each other, valuing each other. Or, conversely, that early exposure might, like inoculation, turn aside the contagion of desire. Exposure was the only known cure at all—to meet, and turn away, and hold resolute in that refusal for the long, long months or years it could take for the passion to die. Even then, it wasn’t reliable. Tragedies were written of soul matings long since thought to be latent or expired that raged to life without explanation or mercy.

“You’re lucky,” Sherlock growled at him, years later, when the boy had just begun to understand the complexity of sexual interactions. Already socially clumsy, and capable of overthinking bubble-gum, Sherlock was loud and open in his despair of ever dealing with—or wanting to deal with—adult sexual relations. “You don’t have to go through all that. It’s efficient, tidy, you don’t have to do anything but wait.”

Mycroft had, over the years, learned to ignore comments—even Sherlock’s comments. He gave his brother a cold, fish-eyed glance. “Of course. How foolish of me to miss the obvious advantages. Never mind that it may be someone I hate—or who hates me. Or loves someone else. Or even has some else’s name on her arm.”

Sherlock sniffed. “Then you’re off the hook, aren’t you? Ignore it, keep away from each other, and it’s done.” He gave his older brother an evil glare in return, and added, “It’s not like you’re likely to go pining, after all, is it?”

Mycroft shrugged, and turned away. The truth, he knew, was that he cared far too much—but he’d already discovered caring hurt, and allowed the people who you cared for to rip your heart to shreds. Sherlock was only one of the early examples.

“It doesn’t make you special,” Sherlock shouted after him. “You know that, don’t you? Probably the only way nature could make sure you’d even try to reproduce.”

Which was a sloppy, illogical statement. Soul mating could couple people who would not, could not ever reproduce: same sex partners, ancient men and little girls years and years from puberty. It could couple the sterile and the barren. It could couple people too close in family bonds, trapping them in incestuous obsession. But Sherlock was right in one sense, Mycroft realized. Soul bond didn’t make him special—just trapped.

By the time he was fifteen the long, delicate helices had formed, still purple and angry on his fair skin. He avoided sports; wore layers of long-sleeved shirts and sweaters and jackets. It didn’t help—the gossip of his soul bond followed him. He’d been a reserved, shy boy anyway. Now no one wanted to deal with him, afraid of his difference or, just as often, unwilling to invest time and affection in someone doomed to fall into an obsessive relationship at some undetermined point in the future. He was almost grateful when he realized he was gay: there was no hope for the boys of his generation to marry or form families in any case. Their standards were different.

Not so different, though—and the boys who didn’t care really didn’t care. They didn’t care who they shagged, or what the future might hold, so long as they got off and got away clean.

It did help keep the girls at bay. Most of them wanted nothing to do with him and his eerie soul bond. The few who did were so soppy and addicted to the entire notion of soul bond that it was easy to explain his own lack of interest. There was the one who dreamed that someday she’d wake up with his name written on her arms. She was insane enough to steal a purple marker from the arts room and write “Mycroft Holmes” in a looping, sentimental script on her left arm—and in clumsy printing on her right, never considering that between the marker ink and the mismatched handwriting her ruse would quickly fail.

He went to uni. Learned to get by with the gay men there, who might not want him forever, but who occasionally wanted him for tonight. Then he got the call from Mummy—“Come home, Mikey. It’s Sherlock…”

“What?” He was on alert instantly. “What’s happened?”

“It’s… He’s…”

Mycroft swore. “What is it, Mummy?”

“He’s like you!” she cried, anger and regret and fury pouring out in one bitter flood. “He’s soul marked.”

It was like a dagger—poor Sherlock! It was like a slap—he’d always known Mummy and Father struggled with his condition, but he’d never been forced to witness that swallowed-down anger and grief quite so completely. “I’m sorry, Mummy. I didn’t… “

She growled, then snapped, “Of course you didn’t, you great looby. It’s not your fault. I just—wasn’t one enough? Do I have to lose both of you this way?”

“You haven’t lost me, Mummy,” he said. It wasn’t as though he was dead, or exiled.

Her silence made it clear that, somehow, he might as well be.

He came home to find Sherlock preening, far more delighted with his marks than Mycroft. “See,” he said, smugly. “You’re not so special. I have them, too.”

“You’ll hate it,” Mycroft said, softly. “When you realize what it means. You won’t have much choice, Sherlock.”

The boy sniffed. “I don’t want choice. I want excitement.” His eyes glittered, and his face was alive. “Soul mated—that’s exciting.”

No, Mycroft thought, sadly. It’s just depressing as hell. But he didn’t want to ruin the boy’s happiness. Someone deserved some joy out of this mess.

Then the counselor came again. This time her face was white as chalk, and she wasn’t mouthing platitudes.

“What is it?” Mummy asked, already knotting her fingers together in fear. “What is it?”

“The fingerprints…”

“You’ve found the match?”

The woman shook her head. “No. No…but…”

“For God’s sake, what?” Mycroft growled. “What is it?”

The woman’s eyes met his. “They’re the same as the prints on yours.”

 “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a unique bond.”

“It has happened before. Not often. Two people with the same bond mate.”

“What—does she have both our prints on her arms?” he asked. “That’s…”

“Sometimes it happens like that,” she said. “It gets ugly. Usually, though, there’s only one set—or one of the sets is faint and starts to fade.”

Mycroft, struck to the heart, wanted to swear and curse at how badly arranged it all was—but, then, that was the point. It wasn’t arranged, it was nature and chance and stupid, stupid luck.

Sherlock began to keen—a high, furious note that hurt Mycroft’s ears. “No. No-no-no-no-no. Mine, Mycroft. She’s mine, and you can’t have her.” He gasped for air, then gasped again, coughing, choking on his own rage, beyond check and reason. “You didn’t want her—she’s mine.”

“By all means,” he said, softly, “I shan’t contest you in the slightest.” Then he walked upstairs, collected his bags, and returned to the battered little Mini that barely contained his long legs and height. He drove up to uni and refused to talk to any of the family for two years after—and then only after he’d been fully absorbed into MI6.

The years went by. Eventually Mycroft gave up on their soul mate ever being located through the National Register. Once children turned sixteen it was considered too late for early meetings in any case, and the children were considered of age. Some chose to keep the prints on their arms on file, and the filigreed helices and the names that seldom came out before full adulthood. Most did not.

Mycroft prospered. His life, already stripped down by his orientation and the passionate, scrawling script on his arms, became still more austere. He was a spy. Spies had colleagues—whom they seldom trusted. They had, occasionally, friends—also forever suspect. A very few had lovers, and those didn’t usually make it onto the trust charts at all.

For a very brief time Mycroft had someone who was all three, and dared to hope this elegant solution to a social conundrum would abide, seeing him through the years to come—years he dreaded, for someday his and Sherlock’s soul mate would arrive. Agent 004 was a bulwark against kismet.

“At least you were lucky.”004 said, tracing the lines of the name on Mycroft’s bare right arm. “At least you got a man.”

“Good for me, I suppose. Less so for Sherlock,” Mycroft responded. “He may be bi. More likely to be bi-curious.”

“Then you take the man and get the brat off the hook,” 004 said. He didn’t think much of Sherlock. Granted, the boy appeared to be almost as brilliant as Mycroft—but word from his sources suggested the younger Holmes was far less stable than his elder brother. Espionage agencies had limited patience with melodrama… “You’re both happy. You get someone who matches your swing; Sherlock gets a chance to pick more to his taste.”

Mycroft shook his head. “You don’t understand. Sherlock wants a soul mate. He’s resented me ever since I first came out, when Mummy and Father were fighting about it every night and no one had time for him. It’s—romantic. It’s special. He’s just furious he has to share his special, special snowflake with me. It’s bad enough now, when I’ve promised to keep out of it. If I took ‘his’ soul mate?” He shook his head. “Even if he’s straight, he won’t let go. He’d rather the drama of being mismated than ever let go.”

“Crazy,” 004 said, and made a mental note to pass the word up the line that the Younger Holmes was a nutter. “Too bad.” Then he returned to prior activities, and soon had Mycroft moaning and sweating, and the subject was forgotten for the evening. Forgotten—but far from ignored.

“Why?” Mycroft asked, months later. “Why? I thought…”

“What?” 004 said, as he loped lazily around Mycroft’s flat, collecting CD boxes and cufflinks and trainers and tossing them into a duffel bag. “That I’d stay? For the love of God, Holmes—you can’t be that daft.”

“I thought…”

“What?”

Mycroft, on the other side of the room, clamped his lips tight, and 004 sighed heavily, hands fisted on his hips. “Jesus H. Christ, Mickey. Don’t—just don’t. I can see it in your eyes.” He pitched his voice high and saccharine. “ _But I thought you loved me!_ Mickey, we’re fuckin’ spies. They need me in Russia, and you know Lyka is in Russia. And you hate Russia, even if they needed you there, which they don’t.” He shook his head. “Come on—look. You’ve got one permanent lover—always have, always will. You want someone to keep, just check your arms, and use our resources to look him up. Hell, for all you know, John Watson will be grateful.”

 

“And, so, he left me,” Mycroft told the MI5 agent who’d been set up to liaise with Sherlock in counter terrorism. He was a nice man. Married, though Mycroft was fairly sure it wasn’t a happy union. It was, however, another rare soul mate match, and he’d found in Lestrade a confidant. What had started as an attempt to brief the other agent in Sherlock’s various quirks, eccentricities, neuroses, and dysfunctions had turned into a slow exchange of life stories. “I used to hope he’d come back to me, but first it was Lyka in Russia, then Mariette in France, then Satine in Jamaica. And then,” he shrugged sadly and traced the ring on his right hand. “Then he had a bit of trouble in Argentina.”

“Trouble?”

Mycroft shrugged a shrug that closed the topic. His eyes, however, added one last notation: a silent, mournful, “Dead, of course.”

“Have you met the man—your soul mate and Sherlock’s?”

“Not yet,” Mycroft said, touching his arm reflexively, tracing letters hidden under a delicately tiny hound’s-tooth checked wool suiting. “I did look him up. He’s an army surgeon. He’s in Afghanistan, right now.”

Both men were silent, avoiding the obvious—that Mycroft would never be quite free of the hope the man would die there, and never trouble him and his brother’s lives.

“It’s not all bad,” Lestrade said in the strained, weary voice of someone who knows that the reverse is far more obvious to everyone. “There are advantages.”

“Such as?”

Lestrade leaned on his elbows, hands around his tea cup, appearing to think. Then, unable to find any clear upside, he seemed to just zone out.

“Can I get you more?” Mycroft said, eventually.

“No,” Lestrade said, rising. “No—I’m due home.”

“Have a good trip.”

Lestrade nodded and left.

Mycroft closed his eyes, shivering in dread. It was so clear that a good trip home was the best the man could hope for, as once he arrived he’d be back in hell.

“Don’t come back,” Mycroft thought silently. “Stay in Afghanistan. Fall in love with someone and run away. Get a job in the States. Do anything—but don’t come back here.”

 

“He never wanted you,” Sherlock said, smug and angry and satisfied all at once. “He told me he used to have two sets on his arms, but yours faded before they even turned into helices. He was glad. He said so—he was glad when they went.”

Mycroft sighed. “He would have to be mad not to be,” he countered. “One set is complicated enough. To be soul bound to two strangers? Unendurable.”

“That’s why he hid it, though,” Sherlock said. “He was afraid they’d find him and make your prints come back, somehow, once they had his prints and knew you were waiting. He wouldn’t even learn to drive till he was twenty-one, just in case someone was checking the fingerprint records for the Registry and found him and made him see you. He didn’t _want_ you.”

Mycroft very carefully didn’t say, “He didn’t want you, either—he just preferred one to two.”

If nothing else, by then it had become a lie.

“Have you told him I was the other set of prints?”

“No,” Sherlock slammed a mug on the counter and poured coffee in so carelessly it left spatters all the way back to the backsplash against the wall. “You promised. You promised he was mine.”

“Yes,” Mycroft said, and collected a sponge from the kitchen sink. He liked his counters clean, even if Sherlock didn’t care. “I promised. I was just wondering.”

“He doesn’t need to know. He’s happy the way things are. He’s perfect,” Sherlock said. “He’s not-gay, so I don’t have to _do_ anything. If he’d just stop dating those other women…”

“If I understand correctly, you’ve decided to be best friends forever—what is it—BFFs? That being the case, why shouldn’t he date women?” Mycroft dodged the word “other” with wary determination.

“We’re soul mates,” Sherlock growled. “I should be enough.”

Mycroft thought back to the short little man in the underground warehouse, fierce and stubborn and committed to his newfound soul mate, in spite of everything. He’d been larger than his form would indicate even then: slightly mad, slightly wild, entirely deadly. Mycroft had felt the pull like a fish that had swallowed the bait whole—gut-hooked and bleeding. He hadn’t liked the man at all, really—he hadn’t like the gritty, surly anger, the mindless loyalty, the failure to detect the many subtle nuances Mycroft had set in play, wanting to see what the man soul bonded to him and his brother would make of them. No—he had not liked John Watson, late of Afghanistan, formerly of 5th Northumberland Fusiliers…but, God, he’d needed him. Hungered. Longed.

Long years of discipline kept him still. Kept him stable. He even touched the man’s hand—made himself touch it, thinking of the man’s name written on his own arm; thinking of his own prints on John Watson’s skin. He’d held firm—and John Watson had shown not so much as a sign of the same attraction.

When the man had left, Mycroft sent his brother a text, saying merely, “He’ll do, brother-mine. Congratulations.”

Then he’d arranged a month off from his position. M understood. Mycroft didn’t face John Watson again until he had found a still center inside himself that would allow him to suffer the hook again, and bear the weeping afterward.

 

“She left,” Lestrade said, eyes shocky and wide. “She just—she left me.”

“I’m sorry,” Mycroft said, and poured the man another scotch. “That’s the hell of soul mating: the allure is almost unendurable, but it’s no promise of happiness.”

Lestrade looked up, obviously on the edge of snapping out “What the hell do you know about it?” when his memory kicked in, and his eyes dropped in embarrassment. “Sorry,” he said, knowing his anger had been too clear, even if he’d stopped short of words. “I forgot.”

“One does. Never mind.”

“How do you stand it?” Lestrade’s anguish was obvious, soaking his voice, written as clearly on his face as his wife’s name was written on his skin. “It hurts…”

“It helps I don’t like him all that much,” he said. “It helps Sherlock adores him.”

Lestrade stared at him, uncomprehending. “I can’t stand her—but, God, I need her, Mycroft. It…” he swallowed, and said once more, hoarsely, “It hurts.”

“Yes,” Mycroft agreed, and swallowed down a full shot of his own scotch, praising the burn as it travelled down his gullet. “Yes, it does.”

“Does it get any better?”

Mycroft shrugged, then said, “For you? I don’t know. Your name’s still on her arm. For me? It…fades. But he hasn’t carried me in his skin for decades, now. For all I know what’s left is only phantom pain: a limb cut off and aching.”

“They say that’s as bad as real pain. Worse, even.”

Mycroft considered, and sighed. “They’re right.”

That night he and Lestrade shared a bed for the first time. They didn’t have sex, or even attempt it—Lestrade was both too drunk and too deep in need for his wife. Mycroft might have managed it if he’d stopped short at two drinks, but at six, he was incapable.

The next time, though, they were only half-drunk. Afterward, Lestrade lay on the bed beside Mycroft and turned his lover’s arm so the letters showed. He turned his own arm and laid it beside Mycroft’s.

“John Hamish Watson,” he said, softly. “Elaine Mallory Brenner.” He sighed. “Yours is fading.”

Mycroft frowned and looked carefully for the first time in years. “So it is,” he said, surprised. Compared to the dark script on Lestrade’s arm, like a blotchy purple bruise, it was pale—almost the dusty lavender blue of a tattoo, rather than the bold colors of soul marks. He touched it, wondering. “It really is. It’s fading.”

“Lucky,” Lestrade said, softly.

“Yours may fade, too,” Mycroft said, and rolled over to kiss him. He slid his hand gently over Lestrade’s arm, feeling his skin, rejoicing that the words had no texture, and that Lestrade’s skin was still his own. “Give it time. Yours may fade, too.”


End file.
